True... but then Microsoft brought in a 1st string of programmers who knew their stuff and basically allowed them to re-implement Java with a clean sheet instead of needing to be backward compatible with any earlier version of Java and to make some changes to the "virtual machine" that worked better in Windows as well instead of needing to work with cell phones or other embedded devices like was the original goal for Java.
Yes, Microsoft originally did work on trying to integrate Java into their operating system, but dotNet became more than that.
It would be more like having the cockpit of the 747 put into a Cessna (or some other airplane). The "interface" would be the same, but everything that interface is connected to beyond the cockpit would be different. Perhaps the cockpit isn't even connected to any airplane at all, but instead to a simulator.
The question here is if this "interface" that allows a common set of training and connectivity to other "stuff" (like pilots) is something that can be copyrighted and controlled by the people who designed that interface? In the case of a cockpit layout, it seems like it likely could be copyrighted too... which is sort of the rub here.
Previous legal precedent is that interfaces between software packages can't be copyrighted, but a legal precedent suggesting that "interface" can be copyrighted would instead force everybody to need to license the API, just as somebody building a cockpit for a 747 would need to get a license for that from Boeing.
Miguel De Icaza did most of his work on Mono as an employee of Novell, so it would be Microsoft v. Novell all over again. I don't know how much money in the bank Novell has to go after Microsoft, but the potential to nail Microsoft against the wall might just be worth the effort... and Novell does seem to have a pretty good team of lawyers that know their intellectual property law. Expect that battle (if it ever happens) to be just as epic as Oracle v. Google.
One of the first juries to attempt "Jury Nullification" included William Penn, the "founder" of Pennsylvania who sat in an English jury and refused to rule in the manner that the judge insisted. Penn and the other jurors spent several years in prison over their refusal to change their verdicts.
It would be sad that such a heritage for America would be casually discarded. Then again, it doesn't surprise me as so much else of the heritage of America has been discarded and ignored as well. Piddling things like the U.S. Constitution no longer matter, as "Constitutional Law" doesn't even include reading the U.S. Constitution.
But Microsoft would need to pay back royalties to Dartmouth University for implementing BASIC without a license. Or perhaps to Harvard University as MS BASIC was originally a class assignment given to Bill Gates by his professor for the few terms he actually attended classes before deciding to drop out and make some real money.
Even money would be to Dartmouth though, as they came up with BASIC in the first place.
Considering that the USS Enterprise (CVN-65... not NCC-1701) is currently scheduled for decommissioning, it might be interesting to see if that may in fact actually happen soon. Conspiracy nuts have suggested the Big E might sink in the Persian Gulf to start a war with Iran, just like what happened to the USS Maine with an earlier "international incident". I doubt that will happen, but sometimes like a broken clock these conspiracy nuts do get some things right.
Steel is no longer made in America mainly because of aggressive "dumping" of steel from foreign sources, where steel was sold in America for a price cheaper than it could even be shipped. When steel makers basically had to give away their product in order to remain competitive, it was no wonder that they ended up just closing up shop instead. This was due to insane trade laws that basically threw American manufacturers under the bus on the goal for global "free trade" ideals.
You could use almost any consumer product in the same category though. America at one point produced most of the televisions, nearly 100% of integrated circuits, and a huge number of consumer electronics in general. None of those are made in America any more, at least in any significant quantities that matter in global markets.
The other problem with Apple v. Microsoft was the fact that the idea of the GUI really originated with Xerox, where Steve Jobs openly admitted to "stealing the ideas" from the Xerox PARC group. Of course this is rehashing an old argument made countless times when the original case was made public.
It was a legal case just like this which gave us the whole concept of software patents, so the concern is just as legitimate. Software patents were originally just as limited, and indeed the original judicial rulings on software patents were even more restricted than is being proposed here for API copyright.
Heck, I would be much more in favor of having an API patented rather than copyrighted, as the concept of life + 70 year copyrights implies a much longer duration over "intellectual property claims" for this kind of activity. At least a patented API would eventually enter the public domain in my lifetime.
John Carmack does post here from time to time, as does Wil Wheton and a few other "famous" geeks. I wouldn't completely dismiss out of hand this idea, but it would need to seriously go into the toilet before that happens.
More likely a "Slashdot Foundation" would be set up more akin to the Free Software Foundation or Wikimedia Foundation that would take over Slashdot as a non-profit charity. I would even be willing to contribute to Kickstarter for getting something like that going if the goal was simply to get Slashdot out of Andover.net.
Obviously something like this shows that the Slashdot brand is now meaningless to Andover/Geeknet (or whatever they want to call themselves now).
The reason this would be profitable is because the traditional entertainment providers are dropping the ball and are so concerned about the short-term bottom line that they have forgotten about what it is that got them into the position of being dominant content providers in the first place.
Yes, a group of would-be independent movie and television producers could come up with something on their own and start providing some really interesting content that might be able to capture the imagination of people, particularly in the largest or one of the largest economic markets of the world.
An example of what may be happening in the future is stuff like Pioneer One. The advantage of a group outside of America is that with the right kinds of government support (however you want to define that), there would be the financial resources to pull this off. These independent producers usually can't get their act together to be able to get a credible challenge to the big boys.
Then again, I might just be surprised and see these independent producers put together a joint service sort of like a cross between Hulu and YouTube with some filters to throw out the crap.
Advertising would certainly be with the traditional Madison Avenue sources, but it should be noted that advertisers really are not tied to any particular platform. They don't care if they are advertising on the internet, billboards, television, radio, movie previews, buses, or on a person's behind. What they care about is simply getting the word out about their products, and to some extent being able to target certain demographic groups depending on the kind of product they are trying to sell. Hulu was able to make a huge cash flow from these advertisers, and in fact most people watching these movies and TV shows didn't mind the "commercials" and were even willing to have them mixed in with the content.
That is where the money is to be made. If some outside group is making high quality content that people want to see, the money will come because the page views and eyes will be there. It doesn't need to be all or nothing either but it would require substantial numbers of people willing to watch this content. The problem is that these companies based in America think that only American companies could come up with content that would be interesting to Americans.
In fairness to the engineers of the original Titanic (and her sister ships), the "unsinkable" nature of the ship was mainly in regards to ordinary leaks and minor structural failures that may happen from time to time. A lousy pilot might damage a part of the hull, but the ship was designed to withstand that kind of general damage. There were very efficient bilge pumps and the various sections of the ship were designed to keep water out.... something that did allow the ship to stay afloat for nearly an hour after it hit the iceberg.
That there were shortcomings in the design is true as well, and something that came from the accident investigation review board that was convened after the original RMS Titanic sank. Still, it was a generally sound design that was used for the original Titanic and as noted the general design did prove to be rather successful as long as general precautions were taken. The Titanic investigation review board also set the pattern for subsequent engineering failures in the future, including the loss of both American Space Shuttles (Columbia and Challenger) as well as the failure of the Tacoma Narrows "Galloping Gertie" Bridge, and for that matter almost every major airline crash investigation. These engineering/transportation investigations usually lead to new regulations, but they also help advance the state of technology in terms of knowing what not to do... something that is sadly learned from experience more often that common sense would make you hope.
This is a very insightful comment. If a foreign studio or group of foreign studios were to start marketing and making content for American audiences, there is no reason to believe that Americans would stick with the traditional content providers. If they would sign a deal with Akamai (or a similar kind of bandwidth service provider) they could easily capture a substantial portion of the current advertisement revenue going to Hulu... and perhaps even put an American television network out of business.
I certainly would be willing to pay a studio in another country if they had something worth watching. Network connections are common enough that there is certainly no reason for the major American television networks to presume they have some sort of silly monopoly or that they are the only players in the market.
To do something like this would require a fairly significant capital outlay, but it would certainly be profitable. The famous actors, directors, and producers would also go follow the money, no matter where those films are being made. Kazakhstan might be a little over the top in terms of who might be able to pull off something like this, but even then it wouldn't be the end of the world if they became the next entertainment "capital" of the world.
As if there was much worth watching on Hulu in the first place. They've mostly become old movies, Bollywood, and very old television re-runs lately. There are a few movies worth watching, but not many.
I'll start watching again when there is something worth watching. In the meantime, I have YouTube, and the Internet Archive for stuff that still is interesting and at least is what it claims to be. Perhaps Netflix will get their act together and use this as an opening to punch out Hulu once and for all.
Yes, there is a need to describe a device as Turing complete if you are going to be accurate. The parent post above got it dead right when he said that Konrad Zuse didn't even get the right millennium in terms of when the first (known) mechanical computer was built. That would likely be the Antikythera mechanism, and there is reason to believe there were machines of similar complexity which existed earlier. The Egyptians and Babylonians had clockworks which predated even this device by several millennia, and depending on your definition you could even describe things like Stonehenge to be a computer.
The point of suggesting Turing completeness is that you get into the realm of programmable computers that have a set of characteristics all to themselves... and that Alan Turing described mathematically a set of characteristics that distinguishes these early mechanical computers (not merely calculating devices either) from more modern computational machines that are typically called "computers" in a modern context.
The issue with Konrad Zuse is that he did build the first functioning Turing complete device (well... made a strong attempt at it with the Z1), with other computers being built about the same time.
The amazing thing about the Babbage design is that it was using technology of a much earlier era and still could get the job done. That is why it is an amazing design and why so many "what if" statements keep getting made about it. Britain certainly had accurate tables for performing firing solutions with their weapons, but just imaging what World War I would have been like with a United Kingdom having at its disposal nearly a half century of computer technology experience is certainly something that would have changed the outcomes of war. Or perhaps if like many inventions the Germans took designs and ideas from the British and refined them to a much larger degree... imagine what Imperial Germany could have done with the same machine and subsequent designs incorporating the electrical circuits that existed in the early 20th Century.
I disagree. Frame rates, film stock, aspect ratios, film speed (used both to increase or decrease blur in the captured image as well as impacting the "resolution" with analog filming), and even doing stuff like switching between 35mm, 16 mm, and even 8 mm cameras (again... resolution adjustments) have all been used in the past.
I admit that frame rate adjustments typically are used to "simulate" looking at video as opposed to film when used, giving the scene or segment a more documentary feel. More like how Blair Witch Project purposely did not use a Steadi-Cam or even a dolly with the filming and instead used simple hand-held cameras (not the best example, but the producers of that movie used a related effect). I've mainly seen that kind of frame rate adjustment in television shows that are typically shot using film and then deliberately using the telecine process to impact the "look" of the show, but then cutting in scenes with video tape.
Yes, the visual impact is jarring, but it can be used for artistic effect in a very successful manner that is really no different than mixing color and black & white scenes. How it will be typically used in the future will be interesting, and I'd dare say that the 24 frame per second shots are going to be used in the future as a sort of "old fashioned movie" feel to that shot when it will be used. The original reason for 24 frames per second really is a limitation of the original equipment, going back to when cameras had a hand crank pulled by the camera operator.
Animation on film (and video) typically uses even lower frame rates, where I've heard of some video shot at 8 frames per second with simply duplicate frames to make up the difference depending on the medium you are trying to target. That is one reason why CGI animation has a very different feel, as the frame rates tend to be much, much higher.
NTSC has two "subframes" that are usually interlaced when they are being displayed. Effectively it is close enough to 60 Hz to be accurate... as long as you have the context correct.
The 29.97 frame rate does some very interesting things in MPEG video though, which doesn't mesh in very well to the formal specification and can lead to some synching problems between audio and video. For a two hour movie it isn't too bad, and only becomes noticeable when you get over about 6-10 hours of continuous video.
I've been to Topaz Mountain in Utah, and it horrifies me that the American government could do even something like that and think it might be constitutional. I certainly see no safeguards put into place to keep this from happening again, and if anything such interment camps could become much larger in the future if some undesirable group came up.
I completely agree that this is something which is not unique to just Germany... and perhaps I admire that the German people and government admit it was something wrong that happened with the Holocaust concentration camps while the American government and people try to sweep such stuff under the rug pretending it never happened in the first place... at least pretending that the U.S. government would never do something like that.
Part of their initial business plan is to go out and map the asteroids to find out which ones might be valuable.
We know there are some that are virtual treasure troves because bits and pieces of them have already come to the Earth in the form of meteors. You can buy them on E-bay because they are common enough (although you should be aware many of those on E-bay and many websites are fake too).
In terms of being reachable, in theory they are all reachable at least if they aren't already crashing into a planet like the Earth or going into the Sun.
I would presume the cost-benefit you are referring to here is the "benefit" to the whole of society as opposed to just the profits generated by this company. I would like to know what kind of benefit to society a bunch of rock crashing into each other as they orbit the Sun provide if they remain undisturbed? There are literally hundreds of thousands of asteroids (likely numbering in the millions), and it will take centuries of aggressive mining activity before that resource is used up, if it even is ever going to be a problem. By that time humanity is likely going to be expanding to other stars throughout the rest of the galaxy.
The benefit, as far as I can see right now, is that somebody is doing something about expanding the reach of humanity and not sitting on their behinds waiting for the world to collapse.
No place to go? Where do you think those "other places to go" got built in the first place? Do you really think God came down and built the resorts in Cancun just for your pleasure?
I would happily send you on your way on one of those rockets built of hydrogen bombs, even if I was condemned to spend the rest of my life on this planet along with my children and grandchildren with the attitude you have displayed here. I can only presume your degree in physics demonstrated you had some brains and understood the science enough to be able to understand the rocket equation, much less economics and how all this works.
You ought to complain to the university that gave you the degree and demand a refund, because they didn't really teach you anything at that school.
Silver is a better conductor than copper. During World War II, the Manhattan Project needed more copper than could be produced by the mines in America, so the War Department got Presidential authorization to take the national silver reserve and spin it into wire for the equipment which helped to refine Uranium.
Copper is pretty good though, and abundant enough that it can be spun into wire for ordinary purposes.
They announced at the press conference that they are already profit positive with existing contracts. In other words, if all they do is simply build these satellites, Planetary Resources is already going to be earning money for these guys. They are paying taxes, employing people, and returning money to the investors in the form of increased equity even as I write this.
How short of a period of time do you need than the fact they were making a profit yesterday?
The question right now is mainly what additional ventures do they want to get into and how quickly are they going to expand as a company? The investors are happy with the current progress of the company, and being in a position of a positive cash flow allows them to take some very interesting risks that sometimes start-up companies can't get into.
That some companies take a portion of their profit and send it into "good causes" and charities, having a company dedicated to expanding the reach of humanity throughout the Solar System sounds like a wonderful charity to me. It is also refreshing to see a company be serious about investing into serious R&D rather than merely buying out other companies to capture their technology.
And here it is. You're just a sad little fascist who wants to tell other people what to do. Thank goodness you don't have any power, you'd wind up hurting people.
The sad thing is that people like this are in political power at the moment, and elected a President who believes this kind of tripe (at least in the USA).
The twin evils of democracy are bread and circuses. Bread has been thrown around for quite some time (just look at the Food Stamp program and note how many people currently qualify for that kind of federal assistance) and the circus is simply the United States Congress. As long as these people are fat, dumb, and happy they don't realize there is a greater universe about us that could make not only their country but the rest of humanity much better off in the future. Instead they would love to be in the penthouse apartment of an outhouse, just because the shit doesn't roll down on them but instead on somebody else. A smart person would come up with an alternative to the outhouse and introduce the idea of plumbing so it wouldn't be necessary in the first place.
They did say that they wanted to bring enough platinum group metals down to the Earth that Gold, Platinum, Silver, and other precious metals would be as cheap as Aluminum is today. In other words, wrapping your baked potatoes in gold foil that is about a half millimeter thick (far thicker than gold leaf) and throwing it away afterward would be considered routine. To do that, they would need to bring metric tons of Gold and similar metals from space.
That is a very long term strategy though (one I think is very likely as well). One other part of the strategy is to put so much demand on launchers that the price point for launching stuff into space (through economies of scale and improved production techniques) would drop to something close to the price of the fuel needed to get up into space. That is about $5-$30 per kilogram. At that kind of a launch price, you could afford to launch bottles of water from the Earth and into space rather than even go hunting for the stuff from an asteroid.
Shipping stuff from orbit to the surface of the Earth is by comparison quite cheap and easy. All you need is a guidance computer (which doesn't need to scale with the size of the vehicle) and some kind of heat shield for atmospheric entry (not re-entry as it never was on the Earth in the first place). The expense for such a vehicle usually is simply trying to get it up into space in the first place, but if you make such a vehicle in space an only need to find a way to get from there to the bottom of the gravity well that is the Earth, it is much easier to accomplish. The fuel, materials, and everything else that you need to make that vehicle all can be made in space from space-based components, so the only other issue is sending up enough tools and initial set of supplies necessary to bootstrap the operation.
I would agree though that if you get something to an Earth-Moon Lagrangian point, that the best use of those materials is to use them at that location or to other orbital locations. Why bother going through the expense of pulling something out of a gravity well when it is already out of that well in the first place?
I do envision that Planetary Resources could become a fuel supplier for a shuttle service where you have fleets of spacecraft that are explicitly designed to never land on a planetary surface of any kind. By planetary surface, I'm even being generous in calling the Moon to be a "planet" (or at least a dwarf planet). In comparison to even Ceres or Vesta, the Moon is absolutely huge and ranks more along the size of Ganymede, Titan, Europa, and Triton. See this table in terms of comparison and note where the Moon is located on that table.
While certainly it is easier to send stuff from the Moon into orbit than it is from the Earth (consider the size of the Lunar Lander compared to the full stack of the Saturn V), I don't think much is going to happen on the Moon except for people simply wanting to go there as a sort of real-estate venture. From a certain point of view, the only real benefit the Moon does is to act as an anchor for things in the Lagrangian points.
Frankly the comment he was responding to was so patently absurd that I think the response was justified in terms of the level of conversation that it was already headed in. Normally I'd agree that the use of such language was juvenile and inappropriate, but considering the magnitude of what happened at this press conference and how totally clueless the post was that he was responding to, the response to "fuck off and die" was completely on target and appropriate.
They certainly didn't RTFA, much less show any sort of attempt to engage in an intelligent conversation about the main topic at hand.
Slashdot Mirror
True... but then Microsoft brought in a 1st string of programmers who knew their stuff and basically allowed them to re-implement Java with a clean sheet instead of needing to be backward compatible with any earlier version of Java and to make some changes to the "virtual machine" that worked better in Windows as well instead of needing to work with cell phones or other embedded devices like was the original goal for Java.
Yes, Microsoft originally did work on trying to integrate Java into their operating system, but dotNet became more than that.
It would be more like having the cockpit of the 747 put into a Cessna (or some other airplane). The "interface" would be the same, but everything that interface is connected to beyond the cockpit would be different. Perhaps the cockpit isn't even connected to any airplane at all, but instead to a simulator.
The question here is if this "interface" that allows a common set of training and connectivity to other "stuff" (like pilots) is something that can be copyrighted and controlled by the people who designed that interface? In the case of a cockpit layout, it seems like it likely could be copyrighted too... which is sort of the rub here.
Previous legal precedent is that interfaces between software packages can't be copyrighted, but a legal precedent suggesting that "interface" can be copyrighted would instead force everybody to need to license the API, just as somebody building a cockpit for a 747 would need to get a license for that from Boeing.
Miguel De Icaza did most of his work on Mono as an employee of Novell, so it would be Microsoft v. Novell all over again. I don't know how much money in the bank Novell has to go after Microsoft, but the potential to nail Microsoft against the wall might just be worth the effort... and Novell does seem to have a pretty good team of lawyers that know their intellectual property law. Expect that battle (if it ever happens) to be just as epic as Oracle v. Google.
One of the first juries to attempt "Jury Nullification" included William Penn, the "founder" of Pennsylvania who sat in an English jury and refused to rule in the manner that the judge insisted. Penn and the other jurors spent several years in prison over their refusal to change their verdicts.
It would be sad that such a heritage for America would be casually discarded. Then again, it doesn't surprise me as so much else of the heritage of America has been discarded and ignored as well. Piddling things like the U.S. Constitution no longer matter, as "Constitutional Law" doesn't even include reading the U.S. Constitution.
But Microsoft would need to pay back royalties to Dartmouth University for implementing BASIC without a license. Or perhaps to Harvard University as MS BASIC was originally a class assignment given to Bill Gates by his professor for the few terms he actually attended classes before deciding to drop out and make some real money.
Even money would be to Dartmouth though, as they came up with BASIC in the first place.
Considering that the USS Enterprise (CVN-65... not NCC-1701) is currently scheduled for decommissioning, it might be interesting to see if that may in fact actually happen soon. Conspiracy nuts have suggested the Big E might sink in the Persian Gulf to start a war with Iran, just like what happened to the USS Maine with an earlier "international incident". I doubt that will happen, but sometimes like a broken clock these conspiracy nuts do get some things right.
Steel is no longer made in America mainly because of aggressive "dumping" of steel from foreign sources, where steel was sold in America for a price cheaper than it could even be shipped. When steel makers basically had to give away their product in order to remain competitive, it was no wonder that they ended up just closing up shop instead. This was due to insane trade laws that basically threw American manufacturers under the bus on the goal for global "free trade" ideals.
You could use almost any consumer product in the same category though. America at one point produced most of the televisions, nearly 100% of integrated circuits, and a huge number of consumer electronics in general. None of those are made in America any more, at least in any significant quantities that matter in global markets.
The other problem with Apple v. Microsoft was the fact that the idea of the GUI really originated with Xerox, where Steve Jobs openly admitted to "stealing the ideas" from the Xerox PARC group. Of course this is rehashing an old argument made countless times when the original case was made public.
It was a legal case just like this which gave us the whole concept of software patents, so the concern is just as legitimate. Software patents were originally just as limited, and indeed the original judicial rulings on software patents were even more restricted than is being proposed here for API copyright.
Heck, I would be much more in favor of having an API patented rather than copyrighted, as the concept of life + 70 year copyrights implies a much longer duration over "intellectual property claims" for this kind of activity. At least a patented API would eventually enter the public domain in my lifetime.
John Carmack does post here from time to time, as does Wil Wheton and a few other "famous" geeks. I wouldn't completely dismiss out of hand this idea, but it would need to seriously go into the toilet before that happens.
More likely a "Slashdot Foundation" would be set up more akin to the Free Software Foundation or Wikimedia Foundation that would take over Slashdot as a non-profit charity. I would even be willing to contribute to Kickstarter for getting something like that going if the goal was simply to get Slashdot out of Andover.net.
Obviously something like this shows that the Slashdot brand is now meaningless to Andover/Geeknet (or whatever they want to call themselves now).
The reason this would be profitable is because the traditional entertainment providers are dropping the ball and are so concerned about the short-term bottom line that they have forgotten about what it is that got them into the position of being dominant content providers in the first place.
Yes, a group of would-be independent movie and television producers could come up with something on their own and start providing some really interesting content that might be able to capture the imagination of people, particularly in the largest or one of the largest economic markets of the world.
An example of what may be happening in the future is stuff like Pioneer One. The advantage of a group outside of America is that with the right kinds of government support (however you want to define that), there would be the financial resources to pull this off. These independent producers usually can't get their act together to be able to get a credible challenge to the big boys.
Then again, I might just be surprised and see these independent producers put together a joint service sort of like a cross between Hulu and YouTube with some filters to throw out the crap.
Advertising would certainly be with the traditional Madison Avenue sources, but it should be noted that advertisers really are not tied to any particular platform. They don't care if they are advertising on the internet, billboards, television, radio, movie previews, buses, or on a person's behind. What they care about is simply getting the word out about their products, and to some extent being able to target certain demographic groups depending on the kind of product they are trying to sell. Hulu was able to make a huge cash flow from these advertisers, and in fact most people watching these movies and TV shows didn't mind the "commercials" and were even willing to have them mixed in with the content.
That is where the money is to be made. If some outside group is making high quality content that people want to see, the money will come because the page views and eyes will be there. It doesn't need to be all or nothing either but it would require substantial numbers of people willing to watch this content. The problem is that these companies based in America think that only American companies could come up with content that would be interesting to Americans.
In fairness to the engineers of the original Titanic (and her sister ships), the "unsinkable" nature of the ship was mainly in regards to ordinary leaks and minor structural failures that may happen from time to time. A lousy pilot might damage a part of the hull, but the ship was designed to withstand that kind of general damage. There were very efficient bilge pumps and the various sections of the ship were designed to keep water out.... something that did allow the ship to stay afloat for nearly an hour after it hit the iceberg.
That there were shortcomings in the design is true as well, and something that came from the accident investigation review board that was convened after the original RMS Titanic sank. Still, it was a generally sound design that was used for the original Titanic and as noted the general design did prove to be rather successful as long as general precautions were taken. The Titanic investigation review board also set the pattern for subsequent engineering failures in the future, including the loss of both American Space Shuttles (Columbia and Challenger) as well as the failure of the Tacoma Narrows "Galloping Gertie" Bridge, and for that matter almost every major airline crash investigation. These engineering/transportation investigations usually lead to new regulations, but they also help advance the state of technology in terms of knowing what not to do... something that is sadly learned from experience more often that common sense would make you hope.
This is a very insightful comment. If a foreign studio or group of foreign studios were to start marketing and making content for American audiences, there is no reason to believe that Americans would stick with the traditional content providers. If they would sign a deal with Akamai (or a similar kind of bandwidth service provider) they could easily capture a substantial portion of the current advertisement revenue going to Hulu... and perhaps even put an American television network out of business.
I certainly would be willing to pay a studio in another country if they had something worth watching. Network connections are common enough that there is certainly no reason for the major American television networks to presume they have some sort of silly monopoly or that they are the only players in the market.
To do something like this would require a fairly significant capital outlay, but it would certainly be profitable. The famous actors, directors, and producers would also go follow the money, no matter where those films are being made. Kazakhstan might be a little over the top in terms of who might be able to pull off something like this, but even then it wouldn't be the end of the world if they became the next entertainment "capital" of the world.
Seriously, I'd love to see this happen.
As if there was much worth watching on Hulu in the first place. They've mostly become old movies, Bollywood, and very old television re-runs lately. There are a few movies worth watching, but not many.
I'll start watching again when there is something worth watching. In the meantime, I have YouTube, and the Internet Archive for stuff that still is interesting and at least is what it claims to be. Perhaps Netflix will get their act together and use this as an opening to punch out Hulu once and for all.
Yes, there is a need to describe a device as Turing complete if you are going to be accurate. The parent post above got it dead right when he said that Konrad Zuse didn't even get the right millennium in terms of when the first (known) mechanical computer was built. That would likely be the Antikythera mechanism, and there is reason to believe there were machines of similar complexity which existed earlier. The Egyptians and Babylonians had clockworks which predated even this device by several millennia, and depending on your definition you could even describe things like Stonehenge to be a computer.
The point of suggesting Turing completeness is that you get into the realm of programmable computers that have a set of characteristics all to themselves... and that Alan Turing described mathematically a set of characteristics that distinguishes these early mechanical computers (not merely calculating devices either) from more modern computational machines that are typically called "computers" in a modern context.
The issue with Konrad Zuse is that he did build the first functioning Turing complete device (well... made a strong attempt at it with the Z1), with other computers being built about the same time.
The amazing thing about the Babbage design is that it was using technology of a much earlier era and still could get the job done. That is why it is an amazing design and why so many "what if" statements keep getting made about it. Britain certainly had accurate tables for performing firing solutions with their weapons, but just imaging what World War I would have been like with a United Kingdom having at its disposal nearly a half century of computer technology experience is certainly something that would have changed the outcomes of war. Or perhaps if like many inventions the Germans took designs and ideas from the British and refined them to a much larger degree... imagine what Imperial Germany could have done with the same machine and subsequent designs incorporating the electrical circuits that existed in the early 20th Century.
I disagree. Frame rates, film stock, aspect ratios, film speed (used both to increase or decrease blur in the captured image as well as impacting the "resolution" with analog filming), and even doing stuff like switching between 35mm, 16 mm, and even 8 mm cameras (again... resolution adjustments) have all been used in the past.
I admit that frame rate adjustments typically are used to "simulate" looking at video as opposed to film when used, giving the scene or segment a more documentary feel. More like how Blair Witch Project purposely did not use a Steadi-Cam or even a dolly with the filming and instead used simple hand-held cameras (not the best example, but the producers of that movie used a related effect). I've mainly seen that kind of frame rate adjustment in television shows that are typically shot using film and then deliberately using the telecine process to impact the "look" of the show, but then cutting in scenes with video tape.
Yes, the visual impact is jarring, but it can be used for artistic effect in a very successful manner that is really no different than mixing color and black & white scenes. How it will be typically used in the future will be interesting, and I'd dare say that the 24 frame per second shots are going to be used in the future as a sort of "old fashioned movie" feel to that shot when it will be used. The original reason for 24 frames per second really is a limitation of the original equipment, going back to when cameras had a hand crank pulled by the camera operator.
Animation on film (and video) typically uses even lower frame rates, where I've heard of some video shot at 8 frames per second with simply duplicate frames to make up the difference depending on the medium you are trying to target. That is one reason why CGI animation has a very different feel, as the frame rates tend to be much, much higher.
NTSC has two "subframes" that are usually interlaced when they are being displayed. Effectively it is close enough to 60 Hz to be accurate... as long as you have the context correct.
The 29.97 frame rate does some very interesting things in MPEG video though, which doesn't mesh in very well to the formal specification and can lead to some synching problems between audio and video. For a two hour movie it isn't too bad, and only becomes noticeable when you get over about 6-10 hours of continuous video.
I've been to Topaz Mountain in Utah, and it horrifies me that the American government could do even something like that and think it might be constitutional. I certainly see no safeguards put into place to keep this from happening again, and if anything such interment camps could become much larger in the future if some undesirable group came up.
I completely agree that this is something which is not unique to just Germany... and perhaps I admire that the German people and government admit it was something wrong that happened with the Holocaust concentration camps while the American government and people try to sweep such stuff under the rug pretending it never happened in the first place... at least pretending that the U.S. government would never do something like that.
Part of their initial business plan is to go out and map the asteroids to find out which ones might be valuable.
We know there are some that are virtual treasure troves because bits and pieces of them have already come to the Earth in the form of meteors. You can buy them on E-bay because they are common enough (although you should be aware many of those on E-bay and many websites are fake too).
In terms of being reachable, in theory they are all reachable at least if they aren't already crashing into a planet like the Earth or going into the Sun.
I would presume the cost-benefit you are referring to here is the "benefit" to the whole of society as opposed to just the profits generated by this company. I would like to know what kind of benefit to society a bunch of rock crashing into each other as they orbit the Sun provide if they remain undisturbed? There are literally hundreds of thousands of asteroids (likely numbering in the millions), and it will take centuries of aggressive mining activity before that resource is used up, if it even is ever going to be a problem. By that time humanity is likely going to be expanding to other stars throughout the rest of the galaxy.
The benefit, as far as I can see right now, is that somebody is doing something about expanding the reach of humanity and not sitting on their behinds waiting for the world to collapse.
No place to go? Where do you think those "other places to go" got built in the first place? Do you really think God came down and built the resorts in Cancun just for your pleasure?
I would happily send you on your way on one of those rockets built of hydrogen bombs, even if I was condemned to spend the rest of my life on this planet along with my children and grandchildren with the attitude you have displayed here. I can only presume your degree in physics demonstrated you had some brains and understood the science enough to be able to understand the rocket equation, much less economics and how all this works.
You ought to complain to the university that gave you the degree and demand a refund, because they didn't really teach you anything at that school.
Silver is a better conductor than copper. During World War II, the Manhattan Project needed more copper than could be produced by the mines in America, so the War Department got Presidential authorization to take the national silver reserve and spin it into wire for the equipment which helped to refine Uranium.
Copper is pretty good though, and abundant enough that it can be spun into wire for ordinary purposes.
They announced at the press conference that they are already profit positive with existing contracts. In other words, if all they do is simply build these satellites, Planetary Resources is already going to be earning money for these guys. They are paying taxes, employing people, and returning money to the investors in the form of increased equity even as I write this.
How short of a period of time do you need than the fact they were making a profit yesterday?
The question right now is mainly what additional ventures do they want to get into and how quickly are they going to expand as a company? The investors are happy with the current progress of the company, and being in a position of a positive cash flow allows them to take some very interesting risks that sometimes start-up companies can't get into.
That some companies take a portion of their profit and send it into "good causes" and charities, having a company dedicated to expanding the reach of humanity throughout the Solar System sounds like a wonderful charity to me. It is also refreshing to see a company be serious about investing into serious R&D rather than merely buying out other companies to capture their technology.
And here it is. You're just a sad little fascist who wants to tell other people what to do. Thank goodness you don't have any power, you'd wind up hurting people.
The sad thing is that people like this are in political power at the moment, and elected a President who believes this kind of tripe (at least in the USA).
The twin evils of democracy are bread and circuses. Bread has been thrown around for quite some time (just look at the Food Stamp program and note how many people currently qualify for that kind of federal assistance) and the circus is simply the United States Congress. As long as these people are fat, dumb, and happy they don't realize there is a greater universe about us that could make not only their country but the rest of humanity much better off in the future. Instead they would love to be in the penthouse apartment of an outhouse, just because the shit doesn't roll down on them but instead on somebody else. A smart person would come up with an alternative to the outhouse and introduce the idea of plumbing so it wouldn't be necessary in the first place.
They did say that they wanted to bring enough platinum group metals down to the Earth that Gold, Platinum, Silver, and other precious metals would be as cheap as Aluminum is today. In other words, wrapping your baked potatoes in gold foil that is about a half millimeter thick (far thicker than gold leaf) and throwing it away afterward would be considered routine. To do that, they would need to bring metric tons of Gold and similar metals from space.
That is a very long term strategy though (one I think is very likely as well). One other part of the strategy is to put so much demand on launchers that the price point for launching stuff into space (through economies of scale and improved production techniques) would drop to something close to the price of the fuel needed to get up into space. That is about $5-$30 per kilogram. At that kind of a launch price, you could afford to launch bottles of water from the Earth and into space rather than even go hunting for the stuff from an asteroid.
Shipping stuff from orbit to the surface of the Earth is by comparison quite cheap and easy. All you need is a guidance computer (which doesn't need to scale with the size of the vehicle) and some kind of heat shield for atmospheric entry (not re-entry as it never was on the Earth in the first place). The expense for such a vehicle usually is simply trying to get it up into space in the first place, but if you make such a vehicle in space an only need to find a way to get from there to the bottom of the gravity well that is the Earth, it is much easier to accomplish. The fuel, materials, and everything else that you need to make that vehicle all can be made in space from space-based components, so the only other issue is sending up enough tools and initial set of supplies necessary to bootstrap the operation.
I would agree though that if you get something to an Earth-Moon Lagrangian point, that the best use of those materials is to use them at that location or to other orbital locations. Why bother going through the expense of pulling something out of a gravity well when it is already out of that well in the first place?
I do envision that Planetary Resources could become a fuel supplier for a shuttle service where you have fleets of spacecraft that are explicitly designed to never land on a planetary surface of any kind. By planetary surface, I'm even being generous in calling the Moon to be a "planet" (or at least a dwarf planet). In comparison to even Ceres or Vesta, the Moon is absolutely huge and ranks more along the size of Ganymede, Titan, Europa, and Triton. See this table in terms of comparison and note where the Moon is located on that table.
While certainly it is easier to send stuff from the Moon into orbit than it is from the Earth (consider the size of the Lunar Lander compared to the full stack of the Saturn V), I don't think much is going to happen on the Moon except for people simply wanting to go there as a sort of real-estate venture. From a certain point of view, the only real benefit the Moon does is to act as an anchor for things in the Lagrangian points.
Frankly the comment he was responding to was so patently absurd that I think the response was justified in terms of the level of conversation that it was already headed in. Normally I'd agree that the use of such language was juvenile and inappropriate, but considering the magnitude of what happened at this press conference and how totally clueless the post was that he was responding to, the response to "fuck off and die" was completely on target and appropriate.
They certainly didn't RTFA, much less show any sort of attempt to engage in an intelligent conversation about the main topic at hand.